Saturday, February 26, 2011
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Top Ten Ways to Make Money on Second Life #2 Sell Information Products
In order to sell stuff on 2L you are going to need two things. One, you are going top need a niche product and two, you are going to need a herd of people that need what you have to offer. The easiest and most popular thing to sell on the Internet is specific information. Creating information products and selling it is the cheapest and easiest way to make a profit. The beauty of selling an information product is that you can write a report, ebook or even have a blog that is connected in some way to Second Life and make money. The real beauty of this is that in order to create an info product, all you really need is time and some specific information that a certain niche would need.
There are all sorts of strategies that you can use to make money with this niche. You could simple write an ebook that is automatically down loadable for a considerable amount of money. That way if you sell only one copy, you have made money on your time. Another strategy would be to promote affiliate products (either on 2L or off) that have links to affiliate products or services that you can make a commission on. if you use a program like Adobe Acrobat, you can have active links in your ebook that link to your other sites. You can give these ebooks away with the right of the reader to make more copies and distribute the ebook to whoever they want. Just make sure that you don't allow them to change the book !!! If they change the links, you will kill your viral marketing efforts.
You can also go outside the realm of Second Life and sell information products through the mail. People really love getting stuff in the regular mail that they can actually get their hands on. You could very easily promote your information product on 2L and sell it online so that it is delivered through the regular mail. The advantage of selling hard copy information products is two fold. For one thing, you can have incredible mark ups for your products ( by the way, you don't have to print them and stick them in to a binder until someone buys them and two you will have all of the clients, or customers information, so you can market to them again and again.
Anyway, I have only scraped the surface of this subject to find out more, keep checking this blog and my other postings.
ELMO aka Marke Solo
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Top 10 Ways to Make Money on Second Life #1 Real Estate
Second Life (2L) is one of the most innovative methods for making money on the Internet. Why do I say this? Because 2L is one of the most wide open opportunities in existence today with its potential still in its infancy. (If you want an overview as to why I feel this way, please see my previous post.) 2L has many different ways of allowing a person to make moola in its environment, and the purpose of this blog is to share as much information about this new format and its opportunities as possible.
An excellent article from America's Best Magazine highlights the reasons why 2L this may be one of the best new formats on the planet. You can read the Article by Jeremiah Leif Johnson from Issue: February 2008 in Section: Best Technology here: Entrepreneurs Find New Markets With Second Life
Many people make money in real estate in 2L. A lady by the name Anshe Chun has already been dubbed the first person to make a million on second Life. Anshe stated with an initial investment of $9.95 and grew her business over a period of two and a half years. The manner in which she aquired her wealth was by purchasing pieces of virtual real estate on 2L. Now Ms. Chun g has been able to bleed from into the virtual world of 2L into the real world, dealing with corporations amd now she has also started her own real life corporation calles Anshe Chung Studios.
An excellent article from America's Best Magazine highlights the reasons why 2L this may be one of the best new formats on the planet. You can read the Article by Jeremiah Leif Johnson from Issue: February 2008 in Section: Best Technology here: Entrepreneurs Find New Markets With Second Life
Many people make money in real estate in 2L. A lady by the name Anshe Chun has already been dubbed the first person to make a million on second Life. Anshe stated with an initial investment of $9.95 and grew her business over a period of two and a half years. The manner in which she aquired her wealth was by purchasing pieces of virtual real estate on 2L. Now Ms. Chun g has been able to bleed from into the virtual world of 2L into the real world, dealing with corporations amd now she has also started her own real life corporation calles Anshe Chung Studios.
There is an important lesson to be learned here and that is you should try to combine off world and off Internet businesses and marketing strategies so that your potential for profit is much greater.
As far as real estate onb second life is concerned, it is very similar to buying and selling real estate in tghe real world. You can acquire real estate and then rent it out for a profit or buy it as low as you can and then sell it for a higher price.
About Me Part II
My Real education about business in second Life began in January 2009. I had just started my Spring semester with Boise State University and decided to take a course called Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World. I was one semester away from my Graduate Degree with a Masters in Educational Technology and Instructional Design. ( Currently as of this writing I have the last semester to do.) The Virtual World we were most concerned with, of course was Second Life (2L). Earlier on, I had experimented a little bit with 2L after seeing an article about it in the Wall Street Journal. I experimented with it a little bit but very quickly discarded it at the time because I felt it was just another Internet time waster. ( As so many things can be on the Internet.)
Once my class began at Boise State, I was immersed in many different aspects of 2L, from building objects, ( called Prims - short for primitives) to engaging in all sorts of online teaching activities. It did not take me very long to realize the teaching potential behind 2L for one very specific reason, just about everyone wants to teach you something in 2L, all you have to do is ask. People are extremely helpful in this environment and just about all inhibitions are off because of the fact that in this virtual world you are only known by your alias. People that are afraid to actually teach or speak publicly in real life ( refered to from now on as RL) are now more than willing to do so in 2L. So, the opportunity to learn something here is wide open.
I believe that 2L is in its infancy as far as business and educational services and experiences are concerned. I personally think in the very near future people will be easily swayed by the idea and ther potential of 2L. The reason for this is because of its stickieness. Once you are involved in some of the more dynamic aspects of 2L, especially social communities, it is very easy to feel as though you are actually a part of something. In business, this is a very important aspect that should not be ignored. As more people become aware of the ease and effectiveness of this type of environment they may become aware of you and how you attend to business there.
To be continued
To be continued
Labels:
marketing,
second life blog,
virtual world,
virtual worlds
Sunday, April 26, 2009
All About Me - Marke Solo (Elmo) Part 1

OK, I guess I'll start by telling you some of things that I have done with businesses as well adventures in Internet marketing. First of all, I am just your normal average guy that does Internet marketing and a couple of businesses on the side.The first business I started was an embroidery business that I operated over the Internet called Ellistrations. I did just about every facet of that business while working a full-time teaching job.
Since the Internet was kind of new to me I thought that I could operate an embroidery business over the Internet. I started to collect books and courses on Internet marketing as well as regular books from the store on marketing. One of the first books I purchased was a book called guerrilla marketing by guy by the name of J. Conrad Levinson. I have to tell you, I am a bookaholic. I am constantly buying books about business. I have probably spent more money on books than I have actually made from my business ventures. (Just kidding, of course.)
Anyway, if you go to my Ellistrations web site at www.ellistrations.com you will see my web site there that I have been running for the last seven years. To be honest with you, I am in the process of shutting down and selling my embroidery business. The reason is pretty simple, I am burned-out. I get orders in all the time for hats and shirts and I have to sew them out all the time and that requires a lot of time.I designed the web site, and all of the shirt and hat designs that are on the web site.
My niche market was musical hats and musical shirts. As a matter of fact, I think I was one of the first people to start doing musical hats and musical shirts on the Internet. The reason I say that, is because I used to sell hats and shirts on eBay! and when I started, people were going crazy over those things! I remember one day there were two women fighting over one my hats. I had created a hat for oboe players and they had never seen one before, so, they kept bidding in bidding on the oboe hat. They literally drove the price of the hat of two almost $80! Now, that hat cost me five dollars to make and I charged them another five dollars for shipping, so, you can see that I was pretty excited about the business I started.I designed trombone hats, trombone shirts, trumpet hats, trumpet shirts, etc. If there was a musical instrument I made a hat or shirt for it.
My bestseller was a trombone hat and shirt that had a picture of a trombone on it and underneath the trombone it said " Bad to the Bone". To this day, it is my number one seller.Anyway, I dabbled in Internet marketing for a while and bought a course about Internet marketing from a guy named Corey Rudl ( a sad story, he was a young man that suddenly died in a race car accident the few years ago.) and tried to learn as much as I could about Internet marketing.One day, for some reason, I had gone to a web site I wasn't familiar with called Clickbank. Clickbank was a web site that you could sell other people's stuff from. To cut a long story short, all you had to do was basically copy and paste a code from Clickbank and paste it into your web page. Just like magic, by pasting the code into your web page, a whole entire sales page would magically materialize for your web site.
If a person went to your web site and saw that page and decided to buy what was there, then you would get a commission on the sale, when they clicked on it and bought it. So, I copied it tasted the code from Clickbank into my web site and forgot all about it.I would say this is about two years ago. Anyway, it was right after Christmas and I went down to my mailbox to get the mail and I noticed that there was an envelope from Clickbank in my mailbox. While I was opening the envelope, I was thinking that it was probably going to be just a small check for about $.30 or something stupid like that. I was absolutely shocked when I saw that it was a check for $130! I was blown away! I didn't do a thing to get that check, I swear to you, other than posting that stupid code in my web page. I told my wife," Now, this is the way to go! I didn't have to sew any hats or shirts, I didn't have to take them down to the post office and stand in line like I always do, I didn't have to do a thing other then go to the mailbox and get my check!"
So, ever since that day, I have been on a quest to learn affiliate marketing. Well, I still do embroidery locally as well as on the Internet with my web site.Since I got my first affiliate check I decided to build an entire web site that was nothing but affiliate based. The web site I have built is called Electric Bikes -n-Scooters (www.electricbikesnscooters.com) and I make money off of that site every single day.However, for those of you reading this thinking, "Hey, that sounds easy!" Let me just forewarn you by telling you that I have put the a lot of blood, sweat, in tears into that web site. I think on that site, I have somewhere around 60 to 70 articles written, mostly by myself. I have Adobe Acrobat electronic books on that site I have written, I have a forum, I have a Blog that I update almost every single day with loads of great information for electric bike and Scooter enthusiasts.
I have also cultivated all sorts of relationships and set out loads of e-mail to potential customers. So, believe me when I tell you that if you want success in a business or in Internet business that you are going to really have to work for it.But I will tell you this, if you want it bad enough you will do it no matter what. I will tell you, that I have written blog posts almost every single day. I have written loads and loads of articles for that web site while I am still running my embroidery business, I am a full-time teacher and I am also pursuing a master's degree in technology education.The big difference I made my life was when I finally turned off the stupid television! I watch one half of an hour of television a day. The show I watch is called Jeopardy, I'm sure you've heard of it ( now, I bet that you really think I am a dork).
I taught myself how to build web sites by purchasing books from the "for dummies" series. My wife will tell you, that I am no genius. As a matter-of-fact when I was a child I had a learning disability, so there's no reason why you or anyone else can't start a business. As a matter-of-fact, because I learned of the web sites I've started my own web site business I got my first client the other day.This Blog will be for everyone who ever wanted to start a business no matter if it is an online business or an off-line business. You will not be alone anymore in your quest or desire to try to be an entrepreneur. I will give you my e-mail address, and if at any time you have a questions or would like some advice or even a kick in the pants, please e-mail me at: elmo033057@gmail.comKeep an eye on this Blog for all sorts of great entrepreneur information and ideas.
ELMO aka Marke Solo
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